This week’s Wednesday

Wednesday is my day off from retail work, which makes it my designated day to record my parts for each week's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio and to try to get around to doing whatever else needs doing. I always run out out of Wednesday before I run out of Wednesday things to do.

                           

A holiday week, but the busy nature of Monday and Tuesday had little or nothing to do with Thanksgiving. On Monday, I had to leave work early for a dentist appointment, and then meet a contractor to discuss a possible home repair. I had an interview scheduled for Tuesday night (for my work-in-progress book Make Something Happen! The DIY Story Of A Power Pop Band Called THE FLASHCUBES), so Dana again agreed to do our programming for this week’s radio show on Monday night.

I am finding that moving the playlist planning session to Monday has been an advantage. On Monday night, I had the playlist finalized shortly after the call with Dana, and I had the individual song and ID files moved into the show folder before going to bed. Tuesday morning, I got up early enough to record all of my back announcements and patter before my morning commute. I annotated the playlist in between tasks at work. When I got home, I checked the spoken sections I’d recorded that morning, and judged only one of ‘em to be in need of a re-do. I carried out that correction and sent the folder to Dana before it was time for my Flashcubes interview.

Unfortunately, the Flashcubes interview didn’t happen, aborted in part by a technical issue at my end. We’ve rescheduled for next week, and I hope to resolve my tech problems by that time. (The most efficient remedy would be for me to buy a new phone. I am not doing that.)

Fourth paragraph in, and we’re just getting to this week’s Wednesday. I had another routine dentist visit Wednesday AM, and that should be my last one until May. I slept in until around 9:00, settled my weekly online banking and bill-paying, showered, and luxuriated in the pure pleasure of my hot mug of Folgers. I ate a bagel with peanut butter and honey, and left the house bound for glory or my dentist’s office, whichever I found first.

The ritual cleaning of my pearly yellows took about 45 minutes. From there, I made it to Comix Zone for my weekly haul—Ancestral Recall, Detective Comics, Justice League Unlimited, Superman, and Uncle Scrooge World’s Mightiest Duck—and then stopped at Funky Town Comics & Vinyl to pick up payment for a bunch of records I’d sold them. As popular as vinyl is among so many of my peers, I rarely listen to LPs nowadays. Mindful of the need to de-clutter where I can, I offered roughly two-fifths of what was left of my vinyl collection for sale to the good folks at Funky Town. I own too much stuff. I absolutely LOVE stuff, and it’s hard to let go of it. But… too much. One must occasionally let go.

What remains

It was only early afternoon, but it felt like a day best spent in chill mode. We had an early dinner of Brenda’s homemade spinach quiche, served with a side of blueberries and Greek yogurt and a bowl of coconut Thai curry soup. We eat well in this household. As evening arrived, we watched Jeopardy! and the first two episodes of the new second season of the wonderful Netflix series A Man On The Inside.

In terms of writing, this wasn't my most productive Wednesday ever, but I did continue to pick at things, mostly at the same things I've been tweaking and editing and cleaning over the past few days anyway. I've done more editing on the Flashcubes book. I've written a little bit more of "Lazarus Lives," a short story that's been on my WRITE-THIS-ALREADY! list since 1979. During all that time, I've only made sporadic attempts to actually write the damned thing, and its form has changed dramatically during its decades of incubation in my head. 

"Lazarus Lives" was conceived in the immediate aftermath of a friend's suicide. The story was originally...down to Earth, I guess, an effort to exorcise trauma and depression. It has since become a fantasy piece, far removed from the real-life events that prompted it. Sometimes you can tell a truer story by lying, by just making things up. "Lazarus Lives" is still a reach for catharsis, even all these years after the fact, but now it's powered in part by memories of the desperate urge to create art. In this case, it's an urge to create comic books, and I use that as the story's backdrop. It means I have to concoct the brand-new characters to populate a comic book series that never existed, but I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. And that job's dangers are no match for my ongoing need to get this 46-year-old primal scream out of my head and onto the page.

...It was that damned calendar driving me on. I know it now, I knew it then. The awareness didn't matter. All I knew was that I couldn't bear to be away from home tomorrow, on the fiftieth anniversary of the last time I saw my best friend alive.

Let's not be coy about this. My friend's name was John. He killed himself, put a bullet in his head when we were still teenagers. Call me a drama queen for not ever getting over it, for still obsessing over it five decades later. That's the irony of suicide. Its memory never dies...

...We were an odd pair. Steve and John! Both outsiders, both intent on creating...something. I was a writer. John fancied himself a poet. His poetry was...well, let's not speak ill of the dead. But he had a gift for concepts, big ideas. All he and I really wanted to do was to write comic books....

I'm determined to finally complete "Lazarus Lives," and to include it in my short story collection Guitars Vs. Rayguns!! Short Stories And Other White Lies, which my vanity imprint Syracuse Noise has deluded itself into believing will be published in the first half of 2026.

Suckers.

                          

Meanwhile, another new story from that presumed book will be shared with my paid subscribers next week (as detailed here). And while I'd hoped that Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) would pass two million accumulated views in time for its tenth anniversary on January 18th, it got there ahead of schedule, notching Click # 2,000,000 this past Sunday. We thank all who choose to Bop along.

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider a visit to CC's Tip Jar. You can also become a Boppin' booster on my Patreon page.

I compiled a various-artists tribute album called Make Something Happen! A Tribute To The Flashcubes, and it's pretty damned good; you can read about it here and order it here. My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available, and you can order an autographed copy here. You can still get my previous book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones from publisher Rare Bird Books, OR an autographed copy here. If you like the books, please consider leaving a rating and/or review at the usual online resources.

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. You can read about our history here